Sunday, April 01, 2012

TEOTWAWKI

I try on a daily basis to check out Timothy Scott Bennett's Facebook page. For those of you who don't recognize the name, he is the author of All of the Above. I consider him to be an author with a changed mind*, and that's one of the reasons I follow his work. And to be honest I haven't read All of the Above yet, but I plan on it. The other day I had one of the librarians at our local library check to see if she could get it for me through inter-library loan. She located two copies: one in Missouri and one in Washington. She put the order in and said, "we'll see what happens." It's a long way from Missouri to northwestern Wisconsin, so I will probably just end up buying the book.

The point of this post, though, is to mention what he said on his facebook page yesterday. It resonated with me. It's what I've felt and what I've heard others express in one way or another. It's something that my great-grandfather(He was a Jehovah Witness) spent alot of time thinking and talking about, so I've heard. It's what Derrick Jensen means when he says that this culture has a death urge. Here is what I read on Mr. Bennett's page:

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem with "warning" that "civilization is at stake" is that, at a deep emotional, psychological, and spiritual level, and likely unbeknownst to the vast majority of people in which this is at work, the Civilized™ humans on this planet seem, to my mind, to actually be craving TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it.) I'd much rather we become conscious of, and speak about that possibility, and why that might be the True™.--Timothy Scott Bennett

My great-grandfather died when I was around a year old. But given the chance I would have asked him why he thought the world was going to end. I was never convinced by the "he was just a nutcase" argument. Why? Because I think at some level we're all craving it. It's just that some have better ways of expressing it than others.